QuickBooks 2012: The Missing Manual

Chapter 25. Customizing QuickBooks

Laid out like the workflow you use when you’re bookkeeping, the QuickBooks Home page provides instant access to all the accounting tasks you perform. Among the centers for vendors, customers, and employees, and your old friend the QuickBooks icon bar, you can take your pick of helpful shortcuts to the features you use the most.

But your business isn’t like anyone else’s. If you run a strictly cash-sales business, you couldn’t care less about customer lists and invoices; making deposits, though, is a daily event. Fortunately, you don’t have to accept QuickBooks’ take on convenience. The Home page and the icon bar come with a set of popular shortcuts, but you can add, remove, rearrange, and otherwise edit which features appear there. You can also add your favorite commands, windows, and reports to the Favorites menu. This chapter covers all your options.

QuickBooks helps you get up and running with built-in business form templates. They’ll do if you have to blast out some invoices. But when you finally find a few spare minutes, you can create templates that show the information you want, formatted the way you want, and laid out to work with your letterhead. Create as many versions as you want. For example, you can make one invoice template to print on your letterhead and another that includes your logo and company name and address for creating electronic invoices to email. This chapter describes the most efficient ways to create forms: using QuickBooks’ ...